Month: February 2013

Although widely known as the home ground of independent coffee shops. I’ve never been much of a fan of the Yongkang commercial district (永康街). Before the Taipei Metro Dongmen Station was opened, the district was highly inaccessible and if you needed to go to the area, your options were either walking for at least 15 minutes from Guting Station or taking a taxi. I never bothered with it very much but since the new subway station basically sits at the entrance of the Yongkang area, I decided it was time for a little exploration.

There are many, many people who love Yongkang Street and I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade but golly, I just don’t see myself falling in love with this place. I suppose you could say the cafes, boutiques and book shops are unique in their own right but the atmosphere, described by many as laid back and literary, bordered on pretentious for me.

That being said, Dwelling Cafe (這宅咖啡) was one of the few shops I was glad to find. The weather was beautiful and I really wanted a cute outdoor seat (as opposed to many of the dark, emo coffee shops people like to label cool…). The sunlight flowed across the ground so magnificently, I wish I had better means to capture the image so that maybe you could imagine bathing in the warmth, too.

Nothing like beautiful weather and an impromptu trip to the beach to put a smile on your face and fill up your heart, especially with your favorite people (and dog) in the world. I really, really wanted to use the waterproof camera and crossed my fingers that Lomography CN 400 would work well enough for the plastic camera – I just adore how well it captured the blue skies at Baisha Bay (白沙灣).

I have a soft spot in my stomach for pies. You can imagine how happy we were to find a pie shop just ten minutes away from where we live – they have them in all the flavors you can imagine, even the salty ones are pretty great.

On the way to our next destination, I made my friends stop the car so that I could take a picture of the beautiful houses in the middle of the fields. It’s just one of those things I’d like to remember with my camera and not want to regret not stopping for that moment.

The Chinese Lunar New Year is half-over (we celebrate, officially, for a total of 15 days) and everyone returns to work today. I’ve been meaning to start blogging again after my Lunar New Year Break posts ended but it’s been a whirlwind of making and packing to get the overdue orders out to the post office. I also dropped off 9 rolls of film at the photo lab today, 8 of them taken in Singapore during my CNY vacation – very excited to see how those turn out!

In the mean time, here are some pictures taken at Danshui (淡水) on my first roll of black and white film, as these were. Using black and white at an antique market was kind of a no-brainer so I really wanted to go out of my comfort zone – not everything has to be in color to be great, right? The tones of the mountains at the back of some of these pictures are right up my alley. They look kind of like ink wash paintings, don’t you think?